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Category: Galleries

If you’re a SmugMug customer, you’re likely a lover of all things photography. You love taking photos, you love sharing photos, and you might even love editing photos. But we’ll bet you’re not in love with the less-romantic bits: organizing, keywording, and getting your photos from the camera to your SmugMug site.

There are some powerful tools out there to help, and we have a favorite: Adobe Lightroom.

Not only does it simplify the process of organizing photos from camera to desktop (or device), it also works directly with SmugMug using our super powerful SmugMug publish service.

Our recently updated LR plug-in will now keep itself up to date automatically, and it works with the latest Adobe Lightroom CC and Adobe Lightroom 6 software. Make sure you’ve grabbed the most recent version of our plug-in to use our best—and most recent—built-in features, including Private Sharing and automatic plug-in updates. It even keeps Lightroom’s new facial-recognition tags in place!

Here’s three reasons why we think SmugMug and Lightroom users would love using our publish service.

Keep It Simple (All Accounts)Simplify your workflow! If you use Lightroom to manage your photos on your computer, then you already know what a timesaver it is. But did you know you can also manage your SmugMug site without opening SmugMug? Import, cull, organize, keyword, upload, and share your photos all from one place.

The most recent update to the SmugMug publish service includes our hottest new feature, private sharing. When you create or edit folders and galleries from the publisher within Lightroom, you’ll be able to select visibility and access settings for those folders and galleries—without ever firing up your browser.

Have your client, or your family, go through galleries you’ve added to an event and choose their favorite photos for a photo album or special edits. Use Lightroom’s Sync Hierarchy and Sync Photos buttons to add their favorite gallery, and its photos, back to your Lightroom catalog to edit.

Lightroom will recognize when you’ve made changes to those files and will mark them for republishing to SmugMug when you’re ready!

Proof Print Orders (Portfolio and Business Accounts)You’ve just received your favorite “Cha-ching!” email from SmugMug: a new photo order has been placed from your Portfolio or Business account. You’ve used proof delay so you can review the order and make any final edits to the photos before sending them to the print lab.

When you edit those files in your Lightroom catalog, they’ll be marked for republishing, too. Press that republish button and send your final, print-ready photos off to your SmugMug site. Now you’re ready to release the order from proof delay and send it to the lab.

This barely scratches the surface of what you can do to manage your SmugMug account from within Lightroom using our plug-in. If you’d like the Ultimate User’s Guide to the Galaxy, er, to the SmugMug Publish Service for Lightroom, check back here soon. We’ve got a great follow-up post coming your way!

Spring has sprung, and we’re celebrating with a slew of new features and improvements released during the past few weeks.

Auto-Scroll and More Photo Options for Carousel
You wanted more options for the new Carousel content block, and we heard you! Now you can enable auto-scroll, looping, randomization, and keyboard navigation. Plus you can choose from additional photo sources: Popular and Recent Photos.

Customize Your Lightbox
Showcase your photos the way you want them to be seen with a customizable Lightbox. Show your background, hide or show the photo tools, enlarge or minimize your Buy button, and more. Go minimal or extra informative. The choice is now yours.

Drag-and-Drop Customization Got Even Better
New drop zones in the Customizer are now larger and highlight where you can drop new content blocks on a page, making it easier to see exactly where you can place your content.

Privately Share Photos
Now you can share your photos with only the people you choose. With our new Private Sharing feature, you can send unique invitation links to friends, family, and clients to give them special access to photos meant for their eyes only.

Want to have complete control over how you share your photos? You’ve got it! Some of the industry’s most powerful (and customizable) privacy features come baked in to a SmugMug account. But they can seem confusing if you’ve never used them before. To help, here are five common scenarios we get asked about a lot, and a quick rundown of which settings you need to flip to be sure your stuff stays exactly as discoverable or as private as you wish.

Scenario 1: The Private Site

I want to share my site with my close family: my mom, my grandma, and my siblings, and only them. I want that to be as easy as possible since they aren’t that computer-savvy.

Scenario 2: The Private Sharer

Enter the email address of the person you want to share the gallery with into the “Invite People” box.

Add your photos to the gallery. When your client accepts the invitation and logs in to SmugMug, they’ll be the only person who can view that gallery.

Scenario 3: The Limited Sharer

In general, I don’t want my galleries to be found. But sometimes I want to share some of my photos on a photography forum. When I do, I don’t want those viewers to find my other galleries and see photos of my kids.

Make sure all your Folders and Galleries are Unlisted. This ensures the public can’t see your galleries, even if they stumble across your homepage.

Create a new gallery for sharing on the forum and set it to Unlisted, plus setHide Ownerto “On.” This removes the breadcrumb that would usually allow visitors to navigate to other parts of your site.

Log out and view your site like a guest. Unlisted galleries shouldn’t be visible.

Get the gallery link to share, being sure the URL starts with “www.smugmug.com” and doesn’t contain your nickname. To check, paste the link to that gallery into a new browser window. You shouldn’t see a way to get back to your homepage, only to SmugMug.com. You’re now ready to share that link on the forum!

Scenario 4: The Conservative Client, Active Pro

I want my client to see photos I took for them and share the gallery within their organization, but I don’t want anyone else knowing I work for that client. The world should be able to find my site and portfolio galleries, though, since that brings in more business.

Create a gallery (or a folder) for your client, and set Visibility to Unlisted.

Log out and view your site like a guest, checking that your client’s galleries don’t show.

When sharing with the client, be sure to copy and share the exact link to the gallery. Test it by pasting the link into your browser bar. It should only work if you used the complete URL. Does it? If so, you’re ready to share it with your client!

Scenario 5: The Split Photographer

I have lots of landscape photos I want picked up by Google, but I do have a few galleries of family pics I’d like to keep visible just by us.

Create a Folder that will contain all your family photos and set the Access to “People I Choose”.

Viewing galleries within this folder will be restricted to people who have been invited to the folder.

Log out and view your site. Your family galleries will display, but opening them will show the access denied (401) page.

We’ve created this handy little chart for quick reference:

We hope these tips come in handy next time you’re worried about your photos getting into the wrong hands. If you ever have any questions or aren’t sure how to set up your galleries for a specific scenario, just ask us. Our Support Heroes are always ready to hear from you.

Today we deliver a better, more secure way for you to share your photos with only the people you want. Since privacy has always been such an important part of the SmugMug philosophy, we felt that our next update should help you feel better knowing exactly who gets to see your photos.

Private Sharing allows you, the account owner, to share galleries securely with people you trust… and only them. It’s a new level of privacy that secures your gallery so its viewed only by a specific set of people that you choose. Nobody else can see it, even if they try the link. The people you’ve selected also get a new, easy way to see the photos you’ve shared with them.

Private Sharing is perfect for sharing the lives of your growing kids, for high-profile celebrity portrait artists or for anyone who wants to stay in control of their photos.

They’ll see a “Shared With Me” page where they can browse all the galleries that have been shared with them.

Tip: Your invitee can create their Guest Account using a different email address than the one you used to invite them. They don’t need to match.

As long as they’re logged in to their own accounts, your friends can browse the shared galleries to their heart’s content, all from one “Shared with Me” page. If they’re not logged in, or if someone else tries to view that same gallery, they won’t be able to open it.

We’ve got extensive new help pages to show you how it works, so be sure to read through them as you start sharing galleries with those you trust.

Free Guest Accounts, Beefier Contacts List, and More Ways to Help Your Fans

Private Sharing is more than just an invite: There’s the all-new Guest Accounts mentioned above (for friends you choose) and a more powerful way of managing Contacts list (for you!)

Guest Accounts are a new, completely free, view-only level of SmugMug membership. They’re required when using Private Sharing, when the person you choose doesn’t already have their own SmugMug membership. Each Guest Account’s “homepage” will display all the galleries that are shared with them, for easy access, but they won’t be able to upload their own photos or create their own galleries.

Note: Your existing SmugMug galleries haven’t changed, so you can keep sharing Public, Unlisted, and Passworded galleries with fans, no login needed! Guest Accounts are ONLY required when you set your gallery to Access > People I Choose.

Contacts used to live in a midnight-dark corner of email sharing in the old SmugMug. We’ve pulled them out and given them a serious makeover so you can better keep track of the people you share photos with on the web. Find them now in their own tab in your Account Settings. From there you can add new people, edit their info and gallery access, and see whether they’ve accepted your Private Sharing invites yet or not.

Finally, we’ve added a new system page to your site. A 401 error page is what viewers will see if they try to view a privately shared gallery without the proper invite. Why is this important? It’s a great opportunity to customize this page like your other system pages to include helpful information like your contact info and step-by-step directions on what to do next. It always pays to be nice!

How is Private Sharing Different From Sharegroups or Events?

Private Sharing – and the special invite link your friends receive – ties the gallery to a person, not to a link or a password, which are two things that can fall into the wrong hands. Once your invitee clicks your Private Sharing invite link and signs in to SmugMug, they’ve redeemed it and the link can’t be reused by anyone else. The only way someone else can view what you’ve shared is if they were looking over your invitee’s shoulder. That’s huge!

Here’s a chart that helps compare our top group-sharing features:

Join Us Online for a Private Sharing Demo

Want to get the full walkthrough on Private Sharing and all the new features, or perhaps you still have questions after trying it yourself? Join us online for a 1-hour live demo on Thursday, March 19th at 5:30 PM Pacific (8:30 PM Eastern) where we’ll explain it step-by-step and answer all your questions.

You made it! We know this is a lot of new info, so please don’t hesitate to peruse the new help pages and register for the Q&A above. And if you’re so excited you simply can’t wait, our marvelous Support Heroes are ready to hear from you.

This beautiful new feature lets your fans have a more interactive experience with your site, allowing them to scroll forwards and backwards through your favorite photos. We loved this idea and are thrilled that so many of you reached out to us. It’s such a gorgeous and interactive way to showcase your favorite photos. Here’s how to use it.

Want to see it in action? Here are a few great examples to get you inspired:

Beautiful Scrolling on All Screens

The Carousel content block can be placed anywhere on the page you’re customizing, plus it’s powered by HTML5, so it looks beautiful on all modern browsers and mobile devices.

You can pull images from any gallery on your site, or hand-pick individual photos from anywhere. And like most other content blocks, you can tweak settings further to show/hide the navigation arrows, change the height of the box, and so on.

Find It Now on All SmugMug Sites

Every site using the New SmugMug can get started using the carousel today. Find it under the Content > Photo section of your customizer and drop it into any page or gallery on your site. (Basic users can drop it anywhere they wish on their homepage.)

Tip: Make sure the photos you upload and your Maximum Display Size are large enough to fill the selections you set in the Carousel block settings. If they aren’t, your images may vary in height within the display area.

We’ve seen carousel-style displays popular with fashion, sports, and commercial photographers, and we’d love to see how you’re using it for your photos. Post a link to your site in the comments below, or share it with us on Facebook or Twitter!

Quick tip for you holiday planners: Guest Uploads are your party’s best friend! With the season of cheer finally here, cameras will be snapping right and left. Use guest uploads to pool all your friends’ photos from the event and remember every antic in years to come.

Get started by looking in your Gallery Settings.

Here’s why you’ll love this handy-dandy feature that comes built in to every SmugMug account (even yours):

How to use it: Look under your gallery settings for the Upload Key and type something in the field. Choose something personal, because it’ll become part of the link you’ll share (and prevent strangers from randomly guessing the URL). Once you save it, we’ll give you a secret link to share. When guests visit that link, we’ll present our web uploader and they can drag their pictures in.

Why it works: After hosting the merriest party that was ever held in the history of holidays, do you really want to be chasing down your friends for their memory cards? Guest Uploads let them do the work on their own time. All you have to do is share the link… and be sure that somebody else volunteers their house for next year’s big bash. ;)

Add an Upload Key so the URL is personalized to you… and safe from party crashers.

Quick-Thinking Tip: Print out the link and include it with your holiday party favors and thank you notes.

So whether you’re hosting your family’s Thanksgiving dinner, planning the office party, or are getting hitched this winter, be sure to capture every last smile!